The display of images and full-motion video is an area of the electronics industry improving with great progress in recent years. The display and rendering of high-quality video, particularly high-definition digital video, is a primary goal of modern video technology applications and devices. Video technology is used in a wide variety of products ranging from cellular phones, personal video recorders, digital video projectors, high-definition televisions, and the like. The emergence and growing deployment of devices capable of high-definition video generation and display is an area of the electronics industry experiencing a large degree of innovation and advancement.
The video technology deployed in many consumer electronics-type and professional level devices relies upon one or more video processors to format and/or enhance video signals for display. This is especially true for digital video applications. For example, one or more video processors are incorporated into a typical set top box and are used to convert HDTV broadcast signals into video signals usable by the display. Such conversion involves, for example, scaling, where the video signal is converted from a non-16x9 video image for proper display on a true 16x9 (e.g., widescreen) display. One or more video processors can be used to perform scan conversion, where a video signal is converted from an interlaced format, in which the odd and even scan lines are displayed separately, into a progressive format, where an entire frame is drawn in a single sweep.
Additional examples of video processor applications include, for example, signal decompression, where video signals are received in a compressed format (e.g., MPEG-2) and are decompressed and formatted for a display. Another example is re-interlacing scan conversion, which involves converting an incoming digital video signal from a DVI (Digital Visual Interface) format to a composite video format compatible with the vast number of older television displays installed in the market.
More sophisticated users require more sophisticated video processor functions, such as, for example, In-Loop/Out-of-loop deblocking filters, advanced motion adaptive de-interlacing, input noise filtering for encoding operations, polyphase scaling/re-sampling, sub-picture compositing, and processor-amplifier operations such as, color space conversion, adjustments, pixel point operations (e.g., sharpening, histogram adjustment etc.) and various video surface format conversion support operations.
The problem with providing such sophisticated video processor functionality is the fact that a video processor having a sufficiently powerful architecture to implement such functions can be excessively expensive to incorporate into many types of devices. The more sophisticated the video processing functions, the more expensive, in terms of silicon die area, transistor count, memory speed requirements, etc., the integrated circuit device required to implement such functions will be.
Accordingly, prior art system designers were forced to make trade-offs with respect to video processor performance and cost. Prior art video processors that are widely considered as having an acceptable cost/performance ratio have often been barely sufficient in terms of latency constraints (e.g., to avoid stuttering the video or otherwise stalling video processing applications) and compute density (e.g., the number of processor operations per square millimeter of die). Furthermore, prior art video processors are generally not suited to a linear scaling performance requirement, such as in a case where a video device is expected to handle multiple video streams (e.g., the simultaneous handling of multiple incoming streams and outgoing display streams).
Thus what is needed, is a new video processor system that overcomes the limitations on the prior art. The new video processor system should be scalable and have a high compute density to handle the sophisticated video processor functions expected by increasingly sophisticated users.